Iain Sinclair: Michael Moorcock, 30 November 2000

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ...”

“... there is no greater ambition than to live and die in Santa Monica. ‘If I ever get the choice,’ Michael Moorcock declares, ‘that’s where I would cheerfully end my days.’ This is simply the most recent turn in what has proved to be one of the greatest tragic-comic intercontinental love stories of all time. Not too long ago lucred Yankee ...”

“... But there is, apparently, more competition for the honour than up the road at Bertorelli’s. Michael Foot passes by and nods, albeit ‘briefly’. Marcia Williams sweeps in: expect no nods from her. She comes under the novelist’s scalpel: ‘She’s an attractive woman, her face has a good bone structure, but there’s something curiously unreal about ...”

“... the plan doesn’t succeed and that the whole story is told, one might say, from Sunset Boulevard. Michael Moorcock’s Jerusalem Commands comes along with paperback editions of two earlier volumes in the series, Byzantium en-dures and The Laughter of Carthage. A stranger to these works and indeed to any ...”

“...Michael Moorcock’s novel honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since – by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment – the asylums were emptied in the Seventies. One sees the London mad everywhere in the streets and parks: ranters, mutterers, arm-wavers ...”

“... than just passively ‘reflecting’. The centre of Turner’s book is a cry for more information. Michael Moorcock’s The Dragon in the Sword has nothing at all to do with any of these concerns, and on the face of it, it is hard to see how the two books could belong in the same genre. Perhaps Moorcock’s should be ...”

Robert Walshe: Bumping into Beckett, 7 November 1985

“... as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming dreams of a vividness and thrust that I hadn’t experienced since I was in the Army. My well-intentioned friends in Poland ...”

Frank Kermode, 27 July 1989

“... to be related to everything else that is going on, however sour. Appleyard also has good words for Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard, for Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract and Denis Potter’s The Singing Detective, as well as for Richard Rogers and Will Allsop – indeed for all who demonstrate what is rather vaguely called ‘the ...”

“... is a bizarre, depressing and unreadable book which comes with an endorsement from Michael Moorcock (‘Tony White reports from the margins, the way all our best writers do’) and an optimistic but inaccurate billing as ‘the bastard offspring of Starsky and Hutch and The X-Files’. The gimmick is that the book is a monologue narrated ...”

“... creating an emergency in which his true ‘nature’ will reveal itself. It is worth saying (and Michael Moorcock, the chief focus of Greenland’s study, was evidently never tired of saying it) that Science Fiction hoists itself up from the general mass of popular literature only by a positive effort of style. Beside Stanislaw Lem, an Old Master in ...”

Iain Sinclair: Jim Sallis, 18 March 1999

“... old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second Confederate governor of Texas’s mansion in Bastrop, thirty miles out of Austin, as a suitable estate for his tax exile? Only the cats know. Spooky, over-refined Egyptian beasts who are let out on a leash while the dew ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

Iain Sinclair, 30 March 2017

“... Ford and Lewis, to the drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for ...”

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

“... perpetual burrowing reminded me of the fractal architecture of the Elizabethan palace contrived by Michael Moorcock for his Spenserian 1978 novel, Gloriana, or The Unfulfill’d Queen. Moorcock, in his turn, was paying his respects to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Being outside the literary mainstream, and seeing the ...”